Airspy with adsbspy on Windows as second receiver

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Hello,

I’m running the latest piaware on a PI 3 to feed to FA, using an RTL dongle.

I’ve got another machine (Windows) with an Airspy connected and running adsbspy. Is there a way for me to take the data collected from adsbspy and pipe it into the RPI as a second receiver?

My basic thought is that I wanted to see if the Airspy on a different computer with a different antenna would be picking up things that the piaware setup is not. And if so, I’d like is to display on the piaware webserver so that I could see the additional planes and then make sure it is also being sent to FA.

I realize FA allows you to have multiple receivers, but this is really only a test and I figured that I’d rather just feed the output of adsbspy into the piaware stuff. Obviously this would be over the network.

I’m unsure of what type of format adsbspy is outputting, but I think it’s some sort of “raw” output over TCP. I tried setting adsbspy to connect to various listening ports on the RPI (rather than having it connect to sdrsharp.com), but I have no idea what port it ought to be connecting to on the RPI.

Is what I’m attempting to do even possible? Does it even make sense to do this?

RPI: running piaware with mlat enabled and currently feeding to FA


dump1090- 512 dump1090   12u  IPv4   9148      0t0  TCP *:30002 (LISTEN)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   14u  IPv4   9153      0t0  TCP *:30005 (LISTEN)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   16u  IPv4   9157      0t0  TCP *:30003 (LISTEN)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   18u  IPv4   9161      0t0  TCP *:30004 (LISTEN)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   20u  IPv4   9165      0t0  TCP *:30104 (LISTEN)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   22u  IPv4  10637      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:30005->127.0.0.1:41932 (ESTABLISHED)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   23u  IPv4  10883      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:30002->127.0.0.1:50138 (ESTABLISHED)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   24u  IPv4  22081      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:30005->127.0.0.1:41938 (ESTABLISHED)
dump1090- 512 dump1090   25u  IPv4  22238      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:30104->127.0.0.1:38898 (ESTABLISHED)
faup1090  630  piaware    3u  IPv4  13019      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:41932->127.0.0.1:30005 (ESTABLISHED)
fa-mlat-c 851  piaware    7u  IPv4  16541      0t0  UDP *:38878 
fa-mlat-c 851  piaware    8u  IPv4  16544      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:41938->127.0.0.1:30005 (ESTABLISHED)
fa-mlat-c 851  piaware    9u  IPv4  16545      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:38898->127.0.0.1:30104 (ESTABLISHED)

Windows: running ADSBSpy

Choices are:

a. enable local server (port 47806 default)
b. connect to an ADSB hub (remote host, port)

Thanks

Mike

2

Yes,
Send it to the RPI on TCP port 30001 using AVR mode.

Port to listen on for raw (AVR-format) input connections. 0 disables.

RAW_INPUT_PORT=“30001”

If you use a format that uses timing then it will try to use it for MLAT and cause MLAT to fail.

3

If you can get adsbspy to listen on a TCP port and provide data in Beast binary format, then you can hook that up to a piaware sdcard image by setting:



piaware-config receiver-type relay
piaware-config receiver-host <hostname or ip of adsbspy host>
piaware-config receiver-port <listening port number>

then rebooting the piaware system.

This will establish one connection to adsbspy and relay that data internally to faup1090, fa-mlat-client, and dump1090 for local map display.

nb. this is mutually exclusive with using a dongle directly on the piaware box - when you set receiver-type relay it will no longer try to receive data from a locally connected dongle.

4

Since I’m running piaware and dump1090fa, is there a particular place I should put that directive?

I did edit /etc/default/dump1090-fa and modified the NET OPTIONS to have: --net-ri-port 30001 . Of course, I had to then set /etc/default/dump1090-fa immutable. Otherwise, it would get overwritten when I reboot or when I do anything with piaware-config.

It is working though. I set ADSBspy to send to that RPI_IP:30001 and I can pretty quickly see the dump1090 web interface show increased messages.

OBJ: Thanks for your input as well. I’ll probably play around with your suggestion, but I really wanted to have both receivers contributing for now.

I still have to get my DPD antenna out of my basement and into my attic or on my roof. I’m considering using POE with an attic install, which would allow me to remove my LMR400 run from the mix.

Thanks!

Mike

5

I have two devices running POE in the attic. A Radarcape and an Odroid XU4(Special POE+ setup because it requires 5amps).No power problems so far (150’/40m cat5e STP cable run)

6

I had seen comments from you in the POE thread I think. I’ll probably go over that thread a few more times and then determine what I need. Only downside is if power does go out and corrupt the SD card, I have to get a thin man to climb up into the attic to fetch it. This is my first experience with RPIs and will be my first experience with POE as well. I think I read where one could use a flash drive to boot from and avoid the SD card corruption. I’ll look into it.

Sorry if this is off topic. If I have any questions about POE, I’ll be sure to post in the appropriate thread.

Mike